Tayari Jones: Day Five

A few months ago, before the media coverage of Clinton/Obama contest pressured black women to decide if we are "women" before we are "black," I sat beside a black man on an airplane. Since such close quarters lend themselves to small talk, he asked me what I do for a living.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “What do you write? Romances?”
“Nope.”
He gave me a sideways glance. “So you have a problem with men?”
Though I was completely aware of the inanity of his question—of both his questions—I found myself working hard to allay his fears. “Oh no,” I said. “I have no problem with brothers!” Once I had disembarked from the plane, claimed my bags, and settled myself in a taxi cab, I recalled my own voice, treakly sweet with an edge of desperation.
What the hell was that all about?

Tayari Jones: Day Four

Publicity is a weird thing for writers. I’ve just come back from the second book tour of my career. The first time, in 2002, I went out on the road to promote Leaving Atlanta, a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Atlanta Child Murders. My publisher, Warner Books, decided to package me as a “southern” writer. For the last couple of months, I’ve been on the road with The Untelling, another novel set in Atlanta. But this go round, I’m doing it as a “black” writer. I know that we are a nation that strives for color-blindness, so it seems sort of inherently offensive to label a writer as “black”. But this is what happened to me, and I have to tell you that, for the most part, it wasn’t so bad. Especially when you compare it to my book tour as a “southern” writer.

Writing Fantasy, Writing New York

Delia Sherman
Thursday, April 10
5:30-7:00
Delia Sherman's most recent short stories have appeared in the Viking young adult anthologies The Green Man, Fairy Reel, and Coyote Road. Her adult novels are Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Award), and, with fellow-fantasist and partner Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. She has co-edited anthologies with Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling. Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited with Theodora Goss, came out in 2007. Her first novel for younger readers, Changeling, was published in 2006. She is a past member of the James Tiptree Jr. Awards Council, an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts, and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation board. Delia has taught writing at Clarion, the Odyssey Workshop in New Hampshire, the Cape Cod Writers' Workshop, and the American Book Center in Amsterdam. She lives in New York city, and writes wherever she happens to find herself

Anthologies, an editor’s pov

Harold Schechter
Wednesday, April 9th
6:30-8:00
Klapper Hall, 7th floor
Harold Schechter, QC professor and author of over thirty books, is also the co-editor of the exquisite everyman/knopf volume, Conversation Pieces: poems that talk to other poems. He will visit a course that is based on this text, speak about the anthology’s inception, as well as answer questions/offer advice about editing anthologies. Aside from editing this volume and various textbooks, he has just completed a ground-breaking anthology of true crime for the library of America (forthcoming, fall 2008).

Tayari Jones: Day Three

The glory of the first novel—for most people—is that it is a piece written without the input of publishers, agents, or any other market-driven forces. During the three years I spent working on Leaving Atlanta, I had an idea to write a triple-voiced coming of age narrative based on my experiences growing up in Atlanta during the child murders. The middle section of the novel is written entirely in the second person using a sort of elevated diction. Not exactly the expected fare in a story with an eleven year old protagonist. But the beauty of the first novel is that I didn’t know that publishers were often afraid to commit to something new and untested. I had no idea that my first agent would kick me to the curb for refusing the try and sell the novel as a YA project. Who knew that twenty-two publishers would be weirded out by the middle section- the one with the big words freaky POV? Not me.

Trauma and Memoir: A Multi-Genre Response

Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30 –8:30 p.m.

MIDDLE EAST & MIDDLE EASTERN AMERICAN CENTER
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Room 9204/5, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)

How is trauma remembered? How is it passed on to future generations? What role can memoir writers play in bearing witness to trauma? This panel explores the ways three women authors have recorded stories of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.

ALEX HINTON (moderator) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, Newark. His publications include Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide and Genocide: An Anthropological Reader.

ANTONIA ARLAN (panelist)is professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature at Padua University, Italy. La masseria delle allodole is her first novel, chronicling her ancestors’ fate Anatolia after 1915. The famous cinematographers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have turned it into a movie by the same name.

MARGARET AHNERT (panelist) grew up in New York City and received her MFA from Goucher College. She has produced television documentaries and lectured as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the author of The Knock on the Door: A Journey through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide, which recounts her mother’s experiences of the forced deportations and Armenian Genocide.

CATHERINE FILLOUX (panelist), an award-winning playwright, has been writing about genocide, human rights, and social justice for the past twenty years; honors include PeaceWriting Award (Omni Center for Peace), Roger L. Stevens Award (Kennedy Center), Eric Kocher Playwrights Award (O'Neill) and Callaway Award (New Dramatists). Her plays have been published produced internationally. She has also written the libretti for two produced operas. She is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders.

Tayari Jones: Day Two

The invitations start around Thanksgiving: Greetings, Ms. Jones! I am events coordinator for the Mayberry Public Library and we are delighted to invite you to be our Black History Month speaker! About ten years ago, when I was struggling to make a name for myself as a writer, I greeted these requests with an uncomplicated delight: my handful of short stories and essays had reached an audience and had earned me a place not just as a spokesperson on black history but as example of black excellence. These invitations usually came without honoraria and I often shared the docket with three or four other “emerging” writers. Some of my peers who are not black writers grumbled a bit about the idea that I could score invitations “just” for being black. And I must admit that at that stage of my life, I did think of this as lagniappe, just a tiny leg up. Since then, I have published two novels and have begun to chafe a bit at these invitations. Like many black writers, my schedule is frequently packed during February, but comparatively lean during the rest of the year. If February is Black History Month, is the rest of the calendar reserved for white people?

Tayari Jones: Day One

Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, about the infamous Atlanta child murders of 1979-81, received the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Untelling, was awarded the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. She has also received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Arizona Commission for the Arts and le Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland. An assistant professor of English at the MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, she is currently completing her third novel, closing a projected trilogy set in her home state of Georgia.

She will be visiting the Queens College campus on Monday, April 14 @ 6 PM.

Each day this week the Bulletin Blog will feature glimpses into Jones’ insights on the writing process, the writing profession and the writer’s identity. Follow the links to read the full articles or essays.



My MFA advisor, Ron Carlson, once told me that writers are either gushers or ekers. Ekers are the romantic sorts that stare at the page for an hour and a half and then carefully write down four perfect words. Gushers are people like me-- or at least people like I used to be-- who write four or five pages in a sort of frenzy. And then they look it over and decide that there is only a half-page of useable writing. That's how I used to be. When I write, I was like me-- on crack. But now, my patterns have changed.

PUBLIC LIVES/PRIVATE LIVES

PEN American Center
PUBLIC LIVES/PRIVATE LIVES
April 29-May 4, New York City
Fourth annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.
This year’s theme of Public Lives/Private Lives couldn't be more timely. How do we draw a line between our private and public selves? When must we tell private stories for the public good? How, as readers, writers, and citizens, do we confront threats to our privacy? What is still considered private in the Internet age? Do we need to redefine the meaning of public and private in the 21st century? The writers in this year’s Festival will mine this rich theme in a variety of literary conversations, panels, readings, and performances.
www.pen.org

“Everywhere at Once”

Tribeca Film Festival
April 23-May 4, New York City
check out . . .
“Everywhere at Once” U.S. premiere: Renowned photographer Peter Lindbergh and experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher, with actress Jeanne Moreau, weave a tapestry of images shaping one woman's deepest sense of selfhood. Text by Kimiko Hahn.
April 27 & 30; May 1 & 4. See listing for time and theater.
www.tribecafilmfestival.org